RESTITUTION
By Enigmafur
Growing up again was tough.
Just when I thought my second chance at life was going great, everything turned to dust. Neocorp, with the help of its new (and formerly peaceful) ally Morpheus, destroyed the Gigadyne. With the end of Gigadyne came the end of their hired guns, the Interstellar Marine Corps. And with the end of the Interstellar Marine Corps came a pain even greater than when I was accidentally thrust into a second childhood.
I don’t define “childhood” as being a certain physical stage anymore. Childhood is when we still believe that, all in all, the world is a mysterious, wonderful place. I regained that feeling not long after I became a Morphesian. But as quickly as it came, it was lost only five years later when I realized that an unpleasant change was sweeping across my new home of Morpheus.
Another Great Revolution was happening. The Industrialists overthrew the Council of High Priests, and instituted several new changes. For one, government provided services were still available, but were now only accessible to the rich. There were many other changes they made, but they all boiled down to one thing: If you were poor, you were as good as dead.
It was one of these “reforms” that destroyed my childhood. Hoping to force all Sanctuary dwellers out of their habitats and into the workforce, they cut off all trade with the Sanctuaries.
Initially, we tried to resist. But only two years later, the consequences from the lack of funding and supplies became evident. The habitats that were supposed to be fully self-sufficient were falling apart, and our crops weren’t enough to sustain us. Desperate to avoid starvation, we marched out of our Sanctuaries and into the world of opportunity.
As it turned out, there wasn’t much opportunity.
Maybe it was something about our reluctance, or maybe we represented
the
I slept and ate very little during those days. This wasn’t actually due to having too little time to sleep or too little to eat, but because of the things I heard. I say heard, and not saw, because there are actually very few sights I remember from the experience that provoke any emotion in me more than a sense of slight discomfort. This was because I saw the same things every day. Crowded sleeping corridors. A bowl of gruel. My hands, working at a machine with a function I cared nothing about. The evening sun, desperately trying to show itself through a dirty pane of glass. The sleeping quarters again.
The sounds I heard, however, will never stop haunting me. Some kid screaming about her poor finger, about the blood and about how it hurt so bad, then another voice, a voice with power telling her to shut up and sit down before he made her regret it. A mother, babbling hysterically about Mischa, please, please, get back up, Mischa. The endless droning of industrial equipment that gave a horrible rhythm to the laments. I hated that rhythm the most of all because it always made it seem that, like the workers themselves, the sounds of their pain and misfortune was operating on a tight schedule. A schedule that someone had composed for a reason I didn’t dare to wonder about.
When I would finally go to sleep after my shift was over, my dreams were often close to reality, the only difference between the two was that in the dreams, I would turn my gaze from my work to whomever I heard crying or screaming. And I’d always wish I hadn’t. Not surprisingly, when I worked the next day, I would never look away from my machine, no matter what I heard. So I heard but never saw, and the only images of fellow workers suffering were in my mind. Maybe I thought it was better that way.
It wasn’t.
Soon, I started to have another recurring dream. It took place in a strange, warped orchestra hall where a single figure walked to the center of the stage, took a graceful bow, and began to conduct as a nightmarish cacophony of moans and screams filled the air. I began to envision this demonic conductor as being the foreman I always heard yelling at people and hitting them for not working hard enough. I hated him more and more until the day I left.
The day I left started out as another sickeningly routine day and seemed like it would remain that way until my machine broke down, the rusty lever snapping off in my paws. I heard determined footsteps marching up behind me, and then a deafening cascade of insults and threats that my drill instructor would have admired. I knew it was the foreman; I’d heard it so many times I could pick his voice out if he were in a crowded baseball stadium.
“…don’t they teach you
goddam little brats how to respect company property?
Your daddy must’ve really hated you to let you be such a stupid,
clumsy little bi-…”
All the muscles in my body tensed up and seemed to move on their own accord. I tightened my grip on the broken lever and swung it around behind me with every bit of strength I could muster.
The lever connected. I looked over my shoulder to survey just how much I had pissed the foreman off. As it turned out, he wasn’t upset.
He was dead. I’d somehow managed to stab the sharp end of the lever through his lower jaw.
I stared in shock as the wolverine foreman’s lifeless body fell to the ground, and for once, I could not hear the droning of the machinery. Everyone else in the factory seemed to be watching, too.
There were distant shouts of terror and confusion from the factory’s security guards, but they seemed distant and distorted, as if they were underwater. I knelt down, still staring at the expressionless, dead face of the foreman. Had I just killed the Conductor that I had seen so many times in my dreams?
I realized with a sick feeling that I had only destroyed one of his many instruments. Surely, it would take a lot more than a lucky hit with a broken lever to end the Conductor. It would likely take me years to even find him.
If I found him.
If he was even real.
“Come with me!” I winced, it was the same voice that had lamented about poor, poor Mischa.
“Come with me, child!” I felt someone grasping my paw. An alarm was going off, a loud, incessant one that sounded more like a threat than a warning. Startled, I looked over at the speaker. She was a sad-eyed, desperate-looking Siberian fox morph. I didn’t have much of a chance to discern much else, because as soon as I looked at her, she quickly picked me up and hurried toward the exit.
My mind was whirling with so many thoughts and emotions, I couldn’t decide what to think or feel. A strange sense of detachment from reality came over me, isolating me further from my already distant surroundings.
Shock.
It was like being on a desert island in the middle of a gray, misty ocean. I remembered the people I’d met in the Corps who, trying to distance themselves from the horrors of battle, spent too long on that lonely island. Their eyes were glazed and their gazes were fixed with the hope that someday, they would eventually find enough energy to scream.
I had made a promise to myself that I’d never be like them. But with every battle that I fought, I began to forget the promise more and more. With a speed ordinarily associated with interstellar travel, my unexpected rescuer carried me out of the building.
My last memory of the factory was seeing it slowly recede as the distance between us and it grew, the alarms buzzing like insects on a humid summer afternoon. I wondered why no one was coming after us, and I was answered by a thick plume of smoke that rose out of a newly shattered window.
Life did not go back to normal after that. It got better, perhaps, but not nearly enough to stop the constant feeling I had of being cheated, or more accurately, robbed. Laikina, the Morphesian who’d rescued me, did her best to take care of me, but there was little that she could do. To be honest, Laikina never really became my mother. It wasn’t that she was neglectful or uncaring; she was simply tired. She’d given all she had to her daughter, and her daughter had died in her arms. I guess that she had become afraid of loving anyone she might outlive.
But I loved her. I always hoped that she would finally find peace some day. And in a way, she eventually did.
Six years later, when I had reached the turning point age of 14, she rejoined Mischa. I remember staying beside her body for several hours, hardly aware that I was weeping while lost in thought. I cried until I fell asleep, and dreamed again of a heartless man in an orchestra hall.
When I woke up, I didn’t want to cry anymore. I wanted to get moving.
And so move I did. I went from odd job to odd job, barely managing to make a living but making it nonetheless, lurking about the bustling Morphesian streets which were increasingly frequented by humans. Oddly enough, humans were now almost as alien and strange to me as they probably were to natural-born Morphesians. I realized the bitter irony of it all; as a human, I had my doubts about the Morphesians, now, as a Morphesian, I had my doubts about humans. And who could blame me? Most of the humans I met were shady, unscrupulous types, the types that Neocorp seemed to have an endless supply of. There were only a few homo sapiens I remembered from my lifetime as Keith that I felt honored to have met.
Private Murphy,
the good-hearted but awkward little kid …PFC Sanchez, the hardcore grunt
with a temper hotter than a cutting torch…Sergeant Gray, the cigar-chewing,
tougher-than-tank-armor old bastard…
…but they were gone now. We’d been scattered shortly after the return from our recon mission to Earth. The Council of High Priests had been to busy getting bribes from the Industrialists to follow through on their plans to investigate the matter of Neocorp. I hoped that wherever my squad members were now, they were doing what they did best: kicking some serious ass. In the world I lived in now, there would need to be plenty of that to set things right again.
I probably would have gone on like that, losing hope, losing faith, losing interest, had it not been for a chance meeting with a man named Jack Lewis.
Five years had passed since Laikina’s death. I was sitting in a crowded, filthy bar, the only place I could get a drink at with the wages I earned. I hunched over the glass of watery beer, hoping that I could just finish my drink without being bothered. As it turned out, I got no such luck. Within seconds, some drunken middle-aged asshole in a business suit decided to start hitting on me. I politely told him to go fuck himself.
He let loose a harsh, barking laugh that made me wince. “You’re…just saying that because you…you’re worried that you’ll never have me…you know what I mean?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Listen, wanna come to my apartment after we’ve settled this little dispute? I have several moves that I wanna practice tonaug—ahem, tonight.”
Suddenly, someone’s hand clapped onto the businessman’s shoulder. “Sir, would you like to leave these premises?”
The businessman looked mildly indignant. “Of course not. Can’t you see that I’m-…”
“Yes, I think that you’d very much like to leave.”
Before he could say anything more, the drunkard was shoved unceremoniously out the bar doors and onto the city streets.
The intervener walked back over to me, smiling faintly and extending his arm to shake my paw.
“’Name’s Jack Lewis. I’m a regular at this place.”